THE HEAT IS ON: BLOWING HOT AND COLD ON FRENCH PRAGMATISM
France has been hit with intense heat today — temperatures are soaring as high as 37 degrees Celsius in Paris, more than 40 degrees elsewhere in the country. That is more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s a scorcher today in France.
On the television and radio, there are guarded warnings about a “canicule” (from the Latin canicula for “little dog”, as the ancient Romans associated extreme heat with the dog star Sirius). Some are cautiously calling the heat a “coup de chaleur”, a less dramatic and alarming term. The French know, of course, that in this country we have bad memories of the consequences of extreme heat. On everyone’s mind is the tragic heat wave during the summer of 2003 when some 15,000 people died unnecessarily in France.
The 2003 heat wave was a terrible embarrassment for the French government because it revealed its incapacity to respond to such a crisis. True, the heat wave of 2003 struck the whole of Europe, a continent that generally is not accustomed to such extreme temperatures. The French were as unprepared as people in other countries. But the consequences in France were much more devastating. Whereas 15,000 died in France, only 300 died in Germany, only about 150 in Spain, and some 2,000 in Britain. Why so many deaths in France? One possible answer is that the heat wave exposed fundamental flaws in the way French society is organised; and perhaps worst of all, indicted the entrenched behaviour of the French. Indeed, the 2003 heat wave was so tragic precisely because it came at a time when the most glaring weaknesses of French society — both culturally and institutionally — coincided with catastrophic consequences.
Culturally, the fact that so many of the 15,000 victims were elderly put the blame squarely on the door of the French themselves. Many blamed these deaths on the cultural reflexes of a society attached to long summer holidays — which in France means, inevitably, leaving elderly parents alone during extended vacations. Indeed, many bodies of the elderly people who died were not found and claimed for weeks, mainly because their relatives were away on holidays. How a society treats its elderly is a test that challenges the morality of all cultures. The French have a particularly bad record in this regard. It’s a sensitive issue, understandably, but it’s widely known in France that elderly people are frequently abandoned by their families, especially during the hot summer, left to live out their fragile lives in heartbreaking solitude. During the summer of 2003, thousands of these elderly people in France perished alone in the sweltering heat.
Secondly, the way in which the French work force is structured was also to blame — notably entitlements to short work weeks and long vacations. Unlike in the Anglo-Saxon world where holidays are usually brief — a week or two — the French tend to take an entire month off in the summer, sometimes longer. A foreigner living in Paris easily forms the impression that France basically shuts down for the summer months. It’s not too far from the truth. The cult of holidays is a secular religion in French society. The French are always seeking to get away somewhere, to flee the stress of work and the banal responsibilities of daily life. This can be immensely enjoyable, to be sure, but it can also have serious consequences. Take the example of domestic animals. The French are often reproached for abandoning their pets in the summer, often leaving them on the side of the motorway, preferring the enjoyable distraction of long holidays to the onerous duty of managing and paying for the care of their pets. Every summer, tens of thousands of pets — mostly dogs — are abandoned in France. There are even billboard campaigns and television adverts that attempt to dissuade the French from behaving so selfishly. In the summer 2003, thousands of pets were cast aside on France’s motorways — and thousands of elderly people were similarly abandoned to die alone of dehydration. Selfish attitudes and long holidays can produce tragic results. Even France’s health minister, Jean-François Mattei, was blamed in 2003 for his failure to return from his holidays to deal with the crisis.
A third reason is technological: the French don’t generally have air conditioning. For Americans who live in France, this is invariably a surprising discovery. Compared with the omnipresence of residential air conditioning in America, very few homes in France are equipped with anything more sophisticated than an electric fan, sometimes not even that. Residential penetration of air conditioning in France is roughly 15%, whereas in the United States it’s more than 70%. Even in southern France where heat waves are common in the summer, most people react to the heat by shuttering their houses and remaining indoors from noon till about 3 o’clock in the afternoon — which is one reason, to the bewilderment of tourists, most shops are shut during these hours. The weak penetration of air conditioning in France has many possible explanations (one is fear of high electricity bills), but during a heat wave the consequences can be catastrophic. Let’s face it, thousands of elderly people in France would not have died during the summer of 2003 if their apartments were equipped with air conditioning.
The final reason, in my view, is the most important one: the lack of pragmatism in French society. In the tragic fallout of the 2003 heat wave, the French government was harshly criticised, and rightly so, for its failure to respond quickly and effectively to the crisis. Part of this can be explained, as noted above, by the way the French labour force is structured and managed, with its 35-hour work week and long holidays (many doctors and hospital workers were on vacation at the time). But beyond that, there was a general system failure in France. The crisis was managed with shocking incompetence — from the health workers on the ground to the highest officials in the government. French unions were quick to blame layoffs in the health sector, and perhaps some of these arguments were valid. But the failiure was more system-wide. Despite an emergency plan, health officials were forced to put bodies in makeshift morgues and bury unclaimed bodies before they could be identified.
The French have many admirable qualities and merits, but one of them is not pragmatic problem-solving. When faced with a concrete problem that requires a practical solution, the French are left paralysed by inaction. French industries design bold and grandiose symbols like the Concorde and the high-speed TGV. Yet when confronted with the slightest stress, these heroic assertions of French industrial pride invariably break down. The French rail system, including the TGV, routinely grinds to a halt whenever snow hits the country. Sometimes thousands of TGV passengers travelling between Paris and London are left sitting for hours in the high-speed train while French engineers scramble to fix the problem. A train from Boston to New York in similar weather conditions would glide effortlessly through the snow. In the winter when the temperature plunges and snow falls, the weather is announced on the TV news practically as a national emergency. French cars are not equipped with snow tires, hence national chaos on the snow-covered streets and motorways. More generally, the French don’t know how to respond, pragmatically, to the challenge of sudden change.
The French, in sum, are brilliant at “talking the talk”, but not so good at “walking the walk”. They are impressive at concepts, hopeless at getting things done. This explains, I believe, why the French health system failed so miserably in responding to the heat wave tragedy of 2003. The French administration is poorly equipped to face sudden pragmatic challenges.
It should be emphasized, of course, that the three other factors converged to aggravate the “canicule” crisis of 2003. Shorter holidays and higher penetration of air conditioning would have considerably attenuated the impact of the catastrophe. All these factors converged, tragically, at the same time — and French health officials were suddenly confronted by the alarming spectacle of their own administrative incompetence. An administrative system with a culture of pragmatism would have spared the French government a great deal of criticism and embarrassment. The heatwave of 2003 laid bare these profound cultural and institutional weaknesses in French society. Presumably, many lessons were learned.
Today’s heatwave is expected to be short-lived, mercifully. The summer of 2011 could well be scorching hot, however. Some believe a heatwave in France this summer could be even worse than the canicule in 2003, with possible political consequences for President Nicolas Sarkozy if he does not manage the crisis effectively. It is a safe bet that, with a presidential election on the horizon next spring, Sarkozy is acutely conscious that French voters will judge his capacity to manage a similar crisis. But Sarkozy, despite his vast powers, must accept the constraints of deeply embedded cultural and institutional reflexes in French society over which he has limited influence.
